Netanyahu campaigned on security as his bloc fell short
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party won the largest number of seats in Israel’s Knesset on Tuesday, but his coalition lost its majority and lacked a clear path to another one that would keep it in power. With three-quarters of the vote counted, The Wall Street Journal projected the bloc at 54 seats, down from 68, after Likud outpolled an opposition bloc that had made the election a referendum on Netanyahu. The Journal reported that a majority of Israelis, including Israeli Arabs, voted against Likud. Under Israel’s complex electoral system, Netanyahu could still be chosen by Israel’s president to make the first attempt at forming a government because his bloc appeared likely to outpoll its opponents, but the vote did not identify partners. Netanyahu campaigned on a hard-line security message and secured Trump’s endorsement in the final days of the race.
The arithmetic gave Netanyahu a procedural opening without a governing majority. The Wall Street Journal described the outcome as far from a complete victory but also a major achievement. It said Netanyahu was in his element, holding a solid position as intricate horse trading began in Israel’s right-leaning body politic. “Politics is what he wakes up to in the morning and what he goes to sleep with at night,” said Yaakov Katz, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, a think tank in Jerusalem. Katz also said: “He’s very smart at understanding the Israeli people and getting into their visceral kind of emotional fears and dreams.”
Netanyahu appealed for another term to “finish the job.” The Journal said Netanyahu “proved himself once again a clever tactician,” energizing his supporters and undecided voters with warnings of security threats that cut to the heart of widespread Israeli fears of another Oct. 7 attack. In the waning days of the campaign, he secured Trump’s endorsement and said there were two more years in Trump’s presidency for them to accomplish their shared goals.
“He knows how to read his constituency better than anyone else,” said Tamar Hermann, a pollster and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. “Also they love him because the center and the left hate him. So they do not measure him by his performance.”
The Journal reported that Netanyahu was trailing in the polls days before Tuesday’s election and seemed to be desperately casting about for a closing argument to voters. He warned that Israel would have to prepare for a future without U.S. military assistance, due to shrinking support among American politicians, and that it might be forced to turn to cryptocurrency and blockchain to get around possibly wider international sanctions over his government’s support for expanding settlements on the West Bank.
To his critics, such warnings underscored the damage that Netanyahu’s policies since Oct. 7 had done to Israel’s security and trade relationships. But some analysts said the warnings captured a critical element of Netanyahu’s appeal as a tactical magician who saw the risks his country was facing and how to overcome them better than his opponents. “It does sound desperate, but it’s also that he’s picking up on something. He knows what voters are scared of—isolation,” Katz said. “He knew how to tap in to those fears, and he is the response. He is the answer.”
Many voters were already upset before the Oct. 7 attack by Netanyahu’s proposal to rein in the independence of the judiciary. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in 2023 to protest the judicial overhaul. “Many Israelis saw that instead of prioritizing the state of Israel like he’s always done, he was prioritizing his own personal gain—not money but his power and his political base,” said Shira Efron, the distinguished chair for Israel policy at RAND, a California nonprofit.
Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of staff of Israel’s military, accused Netanyahu of failing to take responsibility for the Oct. 7 security failure and of prolonging the conflict for his own political survival. Netanyahu denied the accusation, saying he was fighting to eliminate an existential threat to the state. He warned that Eisenkot would ease off hard-line security policies that many Israelis across the political spectrum support.
One of Netanyahu’s campaign slogans, “The Right or Palestine,” portrayed Eisenkot as a leftist who would enlist Arab parties in a coalition that would revive the deeply unpopular idea among Jewish Israelis of a Palestinian state. Eisenkot said no government he headed would revive the two-state formula. The Journal said the messaging not only defined Netanyahu as a “bulwark against the Arabs” but also complicated what would be his opponents’ surest route to a 61-seat majority in parliament: joining with Arab parties that won a large chunk of the overall vote. Netanyahu used a similar line three decades before winning his first term, accusing Shimon Peres of secretly plotting to split Israel’s capital with the Palestinians under the slogan “Peres will divide Jerusalem.”
The Journal said Netanyahu forestalled a political reckoning for the security failures on Oct. 7 by going on offense and waging a multi-front war against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen and Iran; he waged the fight against Iran with President Trump. The Journal said he abandoned Israel’s penchant for short defensive wars for a more aggressive strategy that gave priority to pre-emptive strikes, more permanent military buffer zones outside Israel’s borders and regime change in Iran.
The Journal said Israel scored significant tactical wins in all of its wars, with attacks decimating the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran and demonstrating its intelligence prowess and the highly accurate power of its military. It said Israel’s enemies had not given up. Netanyahu said his security chiefs hid vital information from him ahead of Oct. 7 and failed to wake him early enough on the day of the attack; the chiefs denied the allegations. Those charges caught on with many of Netanyahu’s supporters anyway, pollsters said.
Responsibility for the attacks remained unsettled, in part because Netanyahu had opposed an official inquiry into what went wrong. The Journal said his popularity never fully recovered after Oct. 7, though many of his hard-core supporters were more focused on the military campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran and still saw him as the most reliable guardian of their security. “Some people on the right believe that the military was ill-prepared, that it’s their fault, and they’ll tell you that Netanyahu changed the Middle East,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel at the nonprofit International Crisis Group.
Three years earlier, after the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people and mass hostage-taking by Hamas-led militants, which The Journal called Israel’s worst defeat in its history, Netanyahu and his ministers were shouted down at funerals. Some Likud lawmakers told The Journal at the time that his career was over. The Journal described his showing as possibly the most improbable of a four-decade political career and said it showed he remained Israel’s dominant politician despite heavy opposition and the coalition setback. It said he had fought back from scandals, electoral defeats and corruption charges before, but never from such a blow that struck so directly at his reputation as the Israeli leader most capable of securing the country.
At Likud election headquarters in Jerusalem, supporters were muted as the voting closed and exit polls predicted a weak second-place showing for the party. The room turned increasingly celebratory as more favorable actual voting results piled up. By the early hours of Wednesday morning, party activists, Likud lawmakers and senior ministers began pouring into the convention center ahead of Netanyahu’s speech. Supporters greeted them excitedly and draped some with Likud shawls. Activists danced and chanted “Bibi is the king of Israel.” White Likud ballot slips were thrown in the air as confetti, and one person played a saxophone. Banners on large screens proclaimed, “Bibi never surrenders.”
Nitzan Yehudah, 67, from Nahariya, a city in northern Israel that has been hard-hit during the past three years of war, said he had been pessimistic. He felt less excitement over the course of the Likud election campaign than in previous years. “He was on defense. This was the most important election campaign for him. It will be his last,” he said of the 77-year-old leader. “Serious people changed their views about Bibi. I was already starting to waver.”
Netanyahu’s immediate task was coalition formation rather than another campaign for votes. His bloc’s projected 54 seats left it short of a majority, and no clear path to a new one had emerged. Israel’s president still had to decide whom to give the first attempt at forming a government, and the likelihood that Netanyahu’s bloc would outpoll its opponents could give him that opportunity. The vote did not identify partners. Responsibility for the Oct. 7 security failures also remained unsettled, in part because Netanyahu had opposed an official inquiry. The projected outcome gave Likud the largest number of seats, but not a majority to govern on its own.